Marcel PROUST - Autograph letter signed to the Baroness de Pierrebourg.

Marcel Proust (1871.1922)

Autograph letter signed to Baroness Aimery Harty of Pierrebourg.

Eight pages in-12°. 102 bd Hausmann [early November 1911]

Kolb, Volume X, pages 368 to 370.

“I believe more and more that the artist has before him his work to which he must not change anything. »

Proust rejoices at Madame de Pierrebourg's latest publication.

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“Madame, Like the rich who care for the poor and lean towards them, how touching it is that you thought of an ugly woman! I am sure that you have not put any coquetry, any “witty” in this title: My face and that Claude Ferval [the literary pseudonym of Madame de Pierrebourg] in the impartiality of your creations has forgotten Madame de Pierrebourg and the thing perfectly beautiful, what is His face? I received your book yesterday and I am too unwell at the moment to write to you at length.

I can, however, tell you if you care at all about my opinion that of all your books this is without hesitation my favorite. I don't know anything more beautiful than a truly “beautiful subject”. And what a beautiful subject this is! so real and which is accompanied by such great, such flexible symbols as soon as we think about it. I believe more and more that the artist has before him his work in which he must not change anything (that would be the easy part, to change, to invent outside of reality), the difficult part being to reveal it entirely, to respect all of it. the contours, to put the chisel in the block exactly where we see the statue. How easy it would have been to spoil such a subject, to shorten it or lengthen it through analysis, to overload it with secondary characters and false incidents. Now with the simplicity of a classic tragedy, My figure has no other source of its emotion and its adventures than in the natural development, without intervention of the author, without superadded efficient causes, of the given initial situation. You know so well, without giving explanations, how to show in the actions and words of your characters the spontaneity or the reactions of their feelings that the book transported almost unchanged to the theater would be a very poignant, very new drama, and whose a situation so easily allegorical would allow each person to substitute, if necessary, ugliness, some other secret that it steals from love. (And in this regard I wondered if this is how you had proceeded while working, or if you really could have been able, you whose destiny reflected the beauty of your smile, to live sincerely the life of an ugly person).

Perhaps they should not see each other again. But yet as we see the scene where he covers her with kisses in the darkness. A thousand delicacies, contrary to dramatic optics, would “bear” on it like this woman’s charity which does not want to say: “How beautiful! » to the spectacle that the injured person cannot see. Moreover, its impact as a book will be very great. The singularity of the data, its generality, its truth, the noble simplicity of the implementation, will prevent it from ever being abandoned.

It is a great regret for me, Madame, especially after this last visit to Trouville where you were so exquisite for me and whose words remained in my heart to never be able to see you say so many things about which I am so completed. And my regret is greater now that the friend whom I admire so tenderly, the adorable being who is Georges de Lauris, has entered your life, for the happiness of all I hope. What incomparable hours I would spend with you all. It is also a blindness that prevents us from ever seeing anything of humanity or nature, fortunate however that it did not begin with life and that we can cradle them in our memory and carry them in his heart. Please accept, Madam, my very respectful and admiring tributes. Marcel Proust.

PS I think back to the life and reality side of the book and with what obviousness it poses this terrible algebraic relationship of the lines of the face in which the woman is included without possible escape, this length of Cleopatra's nose which changes for her something which matters more to her that the destiny of empires, his! »